Radio Broadcast (May 1927-Apr 1928)

STUDYING GASES IN THE LABORATORY Looking into the depths of ionized helium atoms with a spectroscope. Charles Grover Smith, who is shown in this picture, spends considerable of his time studying gases, especially helium RADIO ENLISTS THE HELIUM ATOM By VOLNEY G. MATHISON IT'S all so useless, that's why I'm quitting," complained the young college graduate to the chief of the laboratory in which he had lately gotten a job. "What can ever come out of measuring the ohmic resistances of a cubic millimeter of about a million different substances under a couple of hundred different temperatures? That's the job you've given me — nothing but an endless measuring of ohms. If this is what you call scientific research " "It is," interrupted the electro-chemist. " It's the backbone of it — prolonged patience at tedious work." "Seems tedious enough. But I could stand that if I could see some results ahead. I can't see any." "Well, there may be no directly important outcome of what you're doing. You are simply adding to the stock of scientific knowledge in a prosy way, working on a huge book of temperature-resistance tables. You can't tell in advance what it may lead to. Take, for example, the helium-gas rectifier tube used in radio B-supply devices. It was never invented, it just grew out of a lot of laborious work like this. American factories are turning out about 20,000 of these tubes a day at present and the patent profit is close to a dollar and a half apiece. There's a return to pure research at the rate of something like $30,000 a day. That soon pays for a lot of slow laboratory grinding, doesn't it?" "Yes," reiterated the young graduate, "but that tube wasn't developed by any such work as I'm doing here — measuring the resistances of rust, rocks, roots, cocoanut shell, and the end years away. It's all so discouraging!" As a matter of fact, the helium-gas tube for B-devices was the result of a great amount of purely scientific work of the tedious and rather unfocussed sort that this discouraged young chemist was assigned to, though, perhaps, the experiments involved were a good deal more technical. A few years ago we began studying the actions of electrons in gases. At that time nobody knew much about electrons — maybe we don't yet — and the experiments were entirely general in kind. The aim was to find out something, not to invent something. One young fellow had the job of finding out definitely whether or not electrons emitted from a cathode into a tube of gas passed through the gas without colliding with its atom centers. An atom of any kind of substance, as nearly every one now is aware, consists of a group of protons and electrons surrounded by planetary electrons. The space in between seems to contain nothing but electric tension, though now late in 1927 we are about to believe that this tension consists of a flurry of particles called etherons that are so small they make an electron look like a balloon in comparison with an apple, and move almost twice as fast as light. Matter.even solid steel, is nearly all emptiness, and it is the crudeness of our undeveloped physical senses that makes us think otherwise. So this young man set about trailing a lot of wandering electrons through a wilderness of gases to find out what they did in there. He had a photographing outfit that would show the paths of the electrons. Many gases and pressures had to be tried. In one series of experiments each photograph showed the flight of 200,000 electrons, and that young man took 100,000 photographs separately, one after the other, before he got one collision of an electron with the middle of an atom of the gas under test. He kept on, and got a total of eight collisions in 400,000 photographs. Even when it is possible to use a fast automatic machine to take such photographs, they all have to be individually and laboriously examined. The photographer found out something else. He found out that when an electron hit an atom of gas square in the middle, it blew the atom to pieces, producing a shower of unattached electrons, and unsmashable groups of electrons and protons that were named alpha particles. Alpha particles were identified with a spectroscope as being the same as a mysterious gas which had been seen by astronomers pouring over the sun, and which they had named helium — a "sun" word. The alpha particles or helium atoms can be '95